And there are so many ways of making ourselves ridiculous I ...  Cournot said (Traite de l’enchainement des idees fondamentales, etc., Sec. 510):  “It is best not to speak to either princes or peoples of the probabilities of death; princes will punish this temerity with disgrace; the public will revenge itself with ridicule.”  True, and therefore it is said that we must live as the age lives. Corrumpere et corrumpi saeculum vocatur (Tacitus:  Germania 19).

It is necessary to know how to make ourselves ridiculous, and not only to others but to ourselves.  And more than ever to-day, when there is so much chatter about our backwardness compared with other civilized peoples, to-day when a parcel of shallow-brained critics say that we have had no science, no art, no philosophy, no Renaissance, (of this we had perhaps too much), no anything, these same critics being ignorant of our real history, a history that remains yet to be written, the first task being to undo the web of calumniation and protest that has been woven around it.

Carducci, the author of the phrase about the contorcimenti dell’affannosa grandiosita spagnola, has written (in Mosche Cochiere) that “even Spain, which never attained the hegemony of the world of thought, had her Cervantes.”  But was Cervantes a solitary and isolated phenomenon, without roots, without ancestry, without a foundation?  That an Italian rationalist, remembering that it was Spain that reacted against the Renaissance in his country, should say that Spain non ebbe egemonia mai di pensiero is, however, readily comprehended.  Was there no importance, was there nothing akin to cultural hegemony, in the Counter-Reformation, of which Spain was the champion, and which in point of fact began with the sack of Rome by the Spaniards, a providential chastisement of the city of the pagan popes of the pagan Renaissance?  Apart from the question as to whether the Counter-Reformation was good or bad, was there nothing akin to hegemony in Loyola or the Council of Trent?  Previous to this Council, Italy witnessed a nefarious and unnatural union between Christianity and Paganism, or rather, between immortalism and mortalism, a union to which even some of the Popes themselves consented in their souls; theological error was philosophical truth, and all difficulties were solved by the accommodating formula salva fide.  But it was otherwise after the Council; after the Council came the open and avowed struggle between reason and faith, science and religion.  And does not the fact that this change was brought about, thanks principally to Spanish obstinacy, point to something akin to hegemony?

Without the Counter-Reformation, would the Reformation have followed the course that it did actually follow?  Without the Counter-Reformation might not the Reformation, deprived of the support of pietism, have perished in the gross rationalism of the Aufklaerung, of the age of Enlightenment?  Would nothing have been changed had there been no Charles I., no Philip II., our great Philip?